Code for using first para as RSS summary in Radio

Following up on Jon Udell's discussion of reducing the size of RSS summaries, and later Dave Winer's implementation of a callback to make this possible, and then my note on CNN.com's practice of using the first 'graph as a summary, I believe I've made it all work.

As Dave suggested, I defined my own callback in weblogData.callbacks.rssFilterDescription:

on firstPara(description, adrpost) {
 return (html.getOneTagValue(description,"P"))} 

The description is stored in HTML, so getOneTagValue conveniently does exactly what I want.

Of course, if the first tag in my description isn't a P, this won't do what I want it to do.  I'll work on that another time. 

Side note on figuring this out: I spent what seemed like hours trying to make this work with regex.split (which basically worked if you split at </P>) and regex.extract (which never seemed to work.)  Extract was particularly annoying: I had a pattern that looked something like "<P>.*</P>".  Although the documentation of regex.extract suggested that the * would grab the minimum number of characters to make a match work, the * in fact seemed to be greedy: it appeard to match the entire description, which of course starts with a <P> (for the first 'graph) and ends with a </P> (which is actually part of the last 'graph, not the first.)