OK, I THINK I know the problem.... but I definitely found an answer!

I think the global must just return one variable per page built, and thus I only got one short list of characters per page. So, I figured I needed to tweak the link where it is built... in SiteHTML.pm

So, I adjusted Alex's code to make it work in a script, and came up with:
And this worked right out of the box!

One question to the perl guru's, if I could... would you explain EXACTLY what

$short =~ s/\s\S+?$//;

Means? And, since I assume this is the part that cuts at a white space, and since I am using this in my characters list, can I mod it to cut just before the last comma before 100 characters?

(A character list might look like: "Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, Dr. McCoy, Scotty, Lieutenant Sulu, Lieutenant Uhura, Transporter Chief Kyle, Pod Ship, Malignant alien." The above code chops this to: "Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, Dr. McCoy, Scotty, Lieutenant Sulu, Lieutenant Uhura, Transporter Chief...." Which is OK... but I would want to cut it between "Uhura" and the following comma...)

One final note!~ The above code is to shorten Characters (which is my own field). If you use this for Description, make the approipriate edits!

dave