If anyone's interested, I ported this into a Ruby Gem a couple of years back. I haven't given it too much love lately, but it should still be good/useful: http://github.com/jurisgalang/snapurl
>> name = 'http://super.com/'
=> "http://super.com/"
>> name.gsub!(/\W/, '')
=> "httpsupercom"
>> name.gsub!(/^http(s)?/i, '')
=> "upercom"