cannot get user directories to work (e.g. /~user)

[Eris Caffee]

> Actually 701 didn't work either, but 711 did. Does that seem okay?

That will be because your home directory is owned by the group "apache". 
I didn't notice that before.  The group permissions override the world
permissions.  So if you leave the group ownership alone, then you could
use 710, or you could change the group owner of your home directory back
to cparker and user perm 701.  Or you could leave it alone at this point. 
All of these should work fine.

Eris Caffee

PS - That is Eris with an S on the end.  :-)