What's the best way to create a short hash, similar to what tiny Url does?

Question

I\'m currently using MD5 hashes but I would like to find something that will create a shorter hash that uses just [a-z][A-Z][0-9]. It only needs to be around 5-

Answer 1

You could encode your md5 hash code with base64 instead of hexadecimal, this way you get a shorter url using exactly the characters [a-z][A-Z][0-9].