title: conversion of long string to and from short url-friendly string
body: <p>Here's my situation:  </p>
  
  <p>I have an MVC website with links to various "things" that exist in my data store.  Like many websites, I want to have short, descriptive urls for these things, for example <code>www.mysite.com/12/description-of-thing</code> where the "12" in the url represents the key to the data in the datastore.  </p>
  
  <p>I'm currently working with a noSQL solution as opposed to a RDBMS, so instead of short integer keys to the data, I have these long, contrived, fixed-length keys that act as a clustered index to the data.  A url for such a thing in my project might look like this: <code>www.mysite.com/000_sub_2520552274112731878_497d19e/description-of-thing</code>.  Obviously, this is not a nice, short url. </p>
  
  <p>What I'm looking for is to have some sort of bi-directional conversion from something like "000_sub_2520552274112731878_497d19e" to some much shorter, url-friendly string.  </p>
  
  <p>Is something like this possible?  Do any solutions already exist?</p>