How to shorten the titles?

I’ve done this myself using CSS, the title has the class” title”, so you could use a selector like “.shortcode .title”, and the method here for truncating to one line:
https://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/truncate-string-with-ellipsis/

It basically boils down to specifying the max width of the line, then disallowing text wrap (and truncating with an ellipsis), its pretty flexible depending on what you’re trying to do.

I also use this method to truncate my post excerpt to one line, with the title above and the “Continue Reading” below:

.homenews-posts .excerpt {
    display: inline-block;
    overflow: hidden;
    white-space: nowrap;
    text-overflow:ellipsis;
    width: 380px;
    font-size: 11px;}

.homenews-posts .title {color:#239CE4;font-weight:bold;}

.homenews-posts .listing-item{
display:block;
margin: 10px 15px -10px 0;
padding:5px;}

.homenews-posts .listing-item img{
display:none;}