I sometimes find myself having to type a jsbin URL into another device -- a phone is pretty common, for example. When doing this, it's useful if the URL is articulatable, in the sense that one can say it out loud as a word. The existing jsbin algorithm basically creates words on the model CVCVC where C is a consonant and V a vowel. This isn't too bad, but it does occasionally lead to stuff that you can't easily say out loud as a word, such as laqaz or dacib or qehin, and then there's a minor moment of annoyance where I have to refer back to my main window and instead of saying to myself "type in vokag" I need to say "type in Q-E-C-U-W".

Below, a slightly more readable set of words are produced by virtue of stripping out a few letters; q and h are outlawed because they basically doesn't sit right anywhere in a word, c because it collides in sound with c or s, j everywhere but the beginning because it's weird, a couple of others. The difference is small (and shamelessly English-pronunciation imperialistic) but a minor improvement nonetheless in my opinion.

The big down-side to this plan is that it restricts the number of identifiers by quite a bit. Remy's algorithm gives 21 × 5 × 21 × 5 × 21 = 231,525 5-character slugs. Mine gives 18 × 5 × 16 × 5 × 14 = 100,800, which is less than half as many. That might in itself be enough to kill this (fairly minor, admittedly) improvement.

This isn't a pull request because I don't want to have to spin up a whole local jsbin to confirm that I've done it right; it's a suggestion.

Remy's names

Stuart's names