The following is a modified version of Allan Jardine's ellipsis plugin for DataTables.
Basically the original ellipsis plugin freaks out if the "text" a cell contains is an HTML hyperlink. This modification changes the plugin so it won't freak out.
Note that I haven't tested this plugin on anything else but the simple case of a cell containing something like
<a href="mylinkhere">string we want to truncate</a>
so I guarantee no robustness beyond my simple use case.