I will probably end up going with that, but I have confirmed I have RW access to anywhere in my user (~) directory. The catch is I only have ftp access to web root and am confined within it. Now just for conversation sake, if I were to create a directory higher up, could I upload files to it and point UC to serve from this directory?

Just a thought

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Oh yeah 1 more thing,
What should the permissions be set at if we do the .htaccess way?