We were playing with some ideas over at PostRank and realized we needed a way to give out some unique codes. We didn’t want some random string of letters and numbers as that isn’t very memorable. We wanted real words. We wanted something entertaining.

I spent a bit of time looking around. The closest thing I found to what we wanted was Webster. While Webster would work, I wasn’t a big fan of the words we were getting out of the system in some quick tests. After some more fruitless searching, in a fit of not invented here syndrome, I created my own.

Enter, Moniker. Moniker will take a list of descriptive words and a set of animals and give you a string. There are, currently, just over 42 thousand combinations. Enough for what we needed. The system is pretty simplistic and it’s up to you to make sure you aren’t getting duplicates.

titania:~ dj2$ irb
>> require 'rubygems'
>> require 'moniker'
=> true
>> Moniker.name
=> "octagon-zebra"
>> Moniker.name
=> "shallow-lion"
>> Moniker.name
=> "concave-parrot"

The code is all up on GitHub so take a look and feel free to play. Let me know if you’ve got any ideas for improvements