Custom URL Redirects

Hi there,

I’m wondering the best way to do 2 things (which I’m sure can be solved with one thing)

First off, I want to be able to pick custom url’s like:

http://mysite.com/some_custom_word/

And have it redirect to any page I want on my site – regardless of what that page’s slug is. Because sometimes I want the permalinks to have the category in the URL, but sometimes not, it’s almost like using subdomains I guess, but I don’t want to do that.

Secondly, I want to be able to put in custom URL’s of some of the previous version of the site’s URLs to redirect to their new counterparts, but unfortunately the previous version of the site didn’t have any real structure, so I just want to put in a few select important URLs to redirect eg.

http://www.mysite.com/something/other/page1134c.asp

and also pick which page/post that will redirect to.

Any thoughts on how to do this / if there’s a plugin (which if I find a non-plugin way to do this, I might write a plugin to do it because I think it would be mega-helpful) would be much appreciated.