I had to do something similar to what you want to do and found using the id field was not an option so i used an ordered list
It gets all the data from the database and adds 1 to the counter so i get what you want to do. My OL id is just the style i applied to each name/number
<?php
include_once("includes/connection.php");
$counter = 1;
$q = mysql_query("SELECT id, title FROM news ORDER BY id DESC LIMIT 5");
echo "<OL id=\"blah\">";
while($articles = mysql_fetch_object($q)) {
echo "<LI><a class=\"one\" href=\"/news/".$counter."\">".$articles->title."</a></LI>";
$counter = $counter + 1;
}
echo"</OL>";
?>