Apache upgrade broke Movable Type

[Principal Skinner]

I have been using the Movable Type (also known as "Moveable Type", among the spelling-challenged, and "MT" for short) weblog software for the past year. I upgraded it once, without incident, and it is now at version 4, FWIW. But last Thursday, I upgraded my Apache to the current Gentoo version, 2.0.49. Previously it had been 2.0.43 or thereabouts. Since then, until a few hours ago, I couldn't use any of the CGI functionality of MT.

I use Berkeley DB files to store my MT data (rather than MySQL). The DB files live under the home directory of my regular user "bob", as do the static HTML pages that MT generates. What was happening was that apache couldn't see, or at least couldn't write to, the files it needed to.

I have gotten MT up and running again by 1) changing ownership of the DB files to apache:apache, which is not ideal since it is under bob's directory, but I can probably live with that since I never mess with those directly, and 2) giving world write permissions to all the HTML files generated by MT. Obviously I'm not happy about that.

Assuming I want to keep the DB files and the HTML files in my user directory, what is the right way to go about things so that apache can do what it needs to in those directories