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I use the userpage module and the apache mod_rewrite module to take
http://site.com/~membername to redirect to members personal home pages. Mod_rewrite sends
http://site.com/~ urls to a small php application that looks up the member and checks if the member has created a personal page. If the page exists the browser gets redirected to the correct personal page if not I use redirect_header to show a ten second message that the user personal page doesn't exist...and then they get sent on to the default site page.