Publishing My First NPM module

For the past week or so (since setting up my new blog) I've been working on a new JavaScript module that truncates HTML.

Why have I been doing this you ask? Well, very quickly after putting together the theme for this Ghost blog I notice a small annoyance. The helper used to generate excerpts of post for the main page can only truncate based on character or word count. This seemed like a bit of a shortcoming to me, I wanted to be able to truncate on paragraphs so text isn't cut off mid-sentence.

And so Truncatise was born!

As this is my first forte into NPMs I used it as a learning experience.

My first learning opportunity came from writing tests against my new module (which turned out to be VERY useful in highlighting some mistakes). For this I used mocha and chai to construct some BDD/TDD tests.

I also took this as a chance to get to know git a bit better, with use of http://git-scm.com/book, and used the command line tools to set up the repository etc.

The documentation to publish to the NPM registry was very straightforward. Surprisingly so.

I very much welcome bug reports and any contributions. So please use, test, break and modify to your use.

I eventually plan to replace the truncation module used by Ghost with mine to get some real-world testing. If all is stable and bug-free I plan to put in a pull request to the master repository.