Creating Shorter Post Slugs

I’m a happy new WP 1.5 user after extensive 2 years in MovableType.

I am looking for a way to have my post_name values created on publisher as “shorter” slugs- meaning a chunk of text shorter than the full title that has been space substituted, so my PermaLinks are not 10 miles long.

While I can do this manually on enstries created in the WP editing screens, I do most of my composition using the desktop program “ecto”.

What I am lookng for is either a way for the slugs to ber shorted in the first place, or some way on automatically output substrings of wp functions (many MT template tags allowed a parameter to be sent to trunctae a string length to a give number of characters.

I did write a quick hack to convert my 860+ imported MT entries witht heir longish default postnames like “a-really-winded-title-that-makes-for-a-long-url” to be no more than 2 “chunks”, e.g. “a-really”:

https://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/cdb/2005/04/27/first-hack/