jqEllipsis is a jquery plugin which can be used to ellipsify (shorten) your text in case it is very long.
This is a basic implementation plugin which just accepts the html text and shortens it according to the character count provided. An additional feature provided is that after ellipsifying the text, the original text can be seen as is, in a tooltip on mouse hover of the altered text.
The following code sample shows how to use the jqEllipsis plugin :
$(element).ellipsis(20);
Take a look at the demo here - http://srikanthsubramanian.github.com/jqEllipsis