CUT Tag Tools

[stormy]

Title:
CUT Tag Tools

Area:
Entries

Summary:
Similar to editprivacy.bml, It would be nice to have a tool that could mass insert <cut> tags into a journal. The most helpful options would be if the tool could cut in one of two places:

1) The beginning of the entry, before the text.
2) After a designated character #.

Both of which would need to have a safety function that would ignore markup or html tags and cut outside of them.

Description:
Automating certain aspects of tedious journal work is the biggest draw point to new members. The mass journal privacy tool [ http://www.dreamwidth.org/editprivacy.bml ] is one that deserves nothing but praise. It would be nice to automate a similar function - <cut> tags. For feeds, there are already options which automatically cut the text, but communities and personal journals must go through content individually. This would automate the feature across every entry (or perhaps like the Privacy tool, across all entries in a certain security group or maybe by a certain tag - like "writing" or "nanowrimo").

Similar to editprivacy.bml (which is very hard to find on DW, I might add), It would be nice to have a tool that could mass insert <cut> tags into a journal. The most helpful options would be if the tool could cut in one of two places:

1) The beginning of the entry, before the text.
2) After a designated character #. Example: After 500 characters, a sort of 'preview of the entry', a cut is entered.

Both of which would need to have a safety function that would ignore markup, html tags, and the middle of words - basically breaking/cutting at the first available empty space.

Poll #2194 CUT Tag Tools

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 28

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
2 (7.1%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
1 (3.6%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
13 (46.4%)

(I have no opinion)
12 (42.9%)

(Other: please comment)
0 (0.0%)

Comments

[cheyinka]

Maybe for the second option it could be a certain number of words instead of a certain number of characters? That would prevent word splitting, and the only problem would be markup that has spaces in it (anything that sets a style, any <a>, probably others)... but that'd be a problem with doing it by characters, too.

[denise]

It's almost impossible to automatically cut text at a specified place (word boundaries or character boundaries) without running the risk of bisecting an open HTML something, though, and cutting in the middle of, say, a <table> would have disasterous results for the resulting page.

[cheyinka]

Oops, yeah, I was thinking "well, it might be icky but that can be fixed" rather than "well, there goes the entire page".

How does the Latest Things feed do it?

[denise]

The Latest page uses a best-effort attempt, plus does its HTML so that a broken <table> shouldn't kill it entirely, under the theory that a mistake will scroll off soon.

[cheyinka]

Hm. I've never seen it get broken by wayward HTML, which is why I asked. I suppose "x words, or before the first time <table> or <div> shows up" might work? That wouldn't help for wayward em/strong/big/small tags, though...

[cesy]

I'm not keen on this idea - it's likely to result in much broken-ness, and I can't really see the benefit.

Making the edit privacy tool easier to find would be a useful separate suggestion, though.