How to display an author bio excerpt on your WordPress blog

The first thing to do is to create the function. To do so, paste the following code into your functions.php file:

<?php
	function author_excerpt (){	                     					
		$word_limit = 20; // Limit the number of words
		$more_txt = 'read more about:'; // The read more text
		$txt_end = '...'; // Display text end 
		$authorName = get_the_author();
		$authorUrl = get_author_posts_url( get_the_author_meta('ID'));
		$authorDescription = explode(" ", get_the_author_meta('description'));
		$displayAuthorPageLink = count($authorDescription) > $word_limit ? $txt_end.'<br /> '.$more_txt.' <a href="'.$authorUrl.'">'.$authorName.'</a>' : '' ;
		$authorDescriptionShort = array_slice($authorDescription, 0, ($word_limit));
		return (implode($authorDescriptionShort, ' ')).$displayAuthorPageLink; 		
	}
?>

Once done, simply call the function when needed, as shown below:

<?php  if (function_exists('author_excerpt')){echo author_excerpt();} ?>

Thanks to Tim Marcher for the tip!