Depending on how many characters of representation you are willing to stomach, I prefer to use a more limited encoding than base64. Something that avoids IL1o0

Depending on how many characters of representation you are willing to stomach, I prefer to use a more limited encoding than base64. Something that avoids IL1o0 so that a human could type it without guess work. As your human is not likely to know that you are including "0" but not "o", you have to nix both of them. This only matters if the url has any chance of being read by a human (ie ids). If it is some monstrous 2000 character thing that already contains gobs of metadata, go nuts.