I was looking into generating id's for a personal site that I'm doing for fun. The first thing I did was Google around a bit to see what other people are doing. There were some pretty good ideas out there, most of them taking a url and hashing it to a Base64 representation.
That was fine and dandy, but the methods they were using were long and hideous. I'm a huge fan of short and simple approaches because odds are, it's already been done by Microsoft. Since everyone was talking about hashing I figured I would see what this was about in my search result. How to Hash Passswords
It was still a little too complicated. I knew there had to be something simpler. Then I realized that on the Path object you can generate a temporary file name. It's pretty short. I tried it out and it was exactly what I was looking for! I just had to chop off the portion I wanted, since I wanted to restrict it to 7-8 characters.