url shortening and clean urls

[eluser]rickyracoon[/eluser]
I am working on a site that has a table in the database that stores links to some external articles, with the columns link_id, url, and title.

My urls currently look like:

http://www.site.com/article/324

I'd like to change it so the urls will look like:

http://www.site.com/article-title-dash-separated

..and also provide a short-url version of the link that does not include the link_id but rather is just a random hash:

http://www.site.com/F5ytK (example)

How would I route requests to appropriate controllers since everything is just at the top level? I still need other areas of the site to route properly, such as:

http://www.site.com/about

Should route to the about controller. But what if an article has the title "about"? Or what if an article title ends up being the same as the short-url hash?

How would I prevent collisions? What are the best practices here? I'd appreciate any suggestions.