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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.

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.

About open editable pages, are you imagining something like http://consultutah.42pag.es/?

No, it's not really "editable pages". I've just got an idea for a weekend project that needs unique, but book markable pages. I could easily use a guid, but wanted a shorter id, saw this and thought I'd ask. Thx!

I use https://www.npmjs.org/package/cuid