My Blog Engine...small problem!

Ok...I've written a blog system for myself. It works fine.

The problem i have is the following:

The home page is set to display 500 characters of each post with a continue reading link...

Below that the category is displayed.

It works fine excpet when I have a tag half open in the 500 words for example. The first 500 words of this article are:

Code: Select all

Its not often you have the opportunity to have your website professionally designed at no cost, but <a href="http://www.1840dsgn.co.uk">1840dsgn</a> are now offering a basic web design package for <strong>free</strong> to non-profit organisations and individuals.

The package will include:
<ul style="margin-left: 20px;"><li class="bullet">A static XHTML/CSS website hand-coded to be standards compliant</li><li class="bullet">Creation of basic imagery for your site

As you can see the 500 charcter limit cuts off half way through an open <li> element. This means the category displayed below is indented like the bullet point.

What I need to do is somehow ensure all html tags from the 500 words are closed off before it display the category...can anyone help me?

If you don't understand what I',m getting at please ask.

Thanks guys.

From personal experience, I have found that using a blog system where I'm the only contributor, simply checking these things and putting them right at preview is the easiest solution. With a forum, using bb codes like we use here is a better approach - it means that the site author and admins can control the attributes / features to be supported. But there's nothing at all to stop you using the bb code technique in your blog.