wordpress Output Excerpt Manually

There is always the_excerpt(), but that does some pretty specific stuff (e.g. adding paragraph tags, adding [...], not respect the more comment, use the saved excerpt...). Advanced Excerpt is pretty good at customizing that.

If you want to get real simple though:

<?php 
  $content = get_the_content(); 
  echo substr(strip_tags($content), 0, 130) . '...'; 
?>