The Underscore Archives

Hi _

I'm trying to build a site/service and I want to be able to have
usernames ulrs, e.g. http://foo.com/sam

I've worked out how to pass parameters as slashes in the URL eg
foo.com/user/sam where user is a php script but I'd like to do it on
the top level.

Currently I've defined a custom 404 page in .htaccess and I'm using
the $_SERVER['REDIRECT_URL'] variable to get the username.

However I'm rather aware that hacking the 404 isn't really an ideal
solution, anybody know how to do it properly?

FYI I'm running apache1.3 on a MacOSX box and I've got root access.

Rgds
Sam