On: Show HN: Small, public, shareable spreadsheets

[stevekemp]

A lot of simple sites just use an incrementing ID which is encoded in base36 for output:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_36

If you don't care about the lengths of identifiers you can instead use a GUID. Otherwise you're down to compressed strings that slowly expand in length, and uniqueness tests on generation.

[nateparrott → stevekemp]

You might also want to append some random data onto each id you assign, to prevent malicious bots from just iterating through all the id's and doing evil on them.