title: fixing cakephp .htaccess/mod_rewrite for shared hosting setups
body: <p>I'm trying to install cakePHP on a shared hosting setup.  After extracting the files to a location like <strong>~/public_html/dev/cake</strong> and visiting the appropriate URL (in this case <strong><a href="http://hostname/~username/dev/cake/" rel="noreferrer">http://hostname/~username/dev/cake/</a></strong>), I receive a 404 error: 
  <hr>
  Not Found</p>
  
  <p>The requested URL /usr/home/username/public_html/dev/cake/app/webroot/ was not found on this server.</p>
  
  <hr>
  
  <p>I suspect that the reason for this is that upon closer inspection, the absolute path to <strong>~/public_html</strong> is not in fact <strong>/usr/home/username/public_html</strong>, but rather <strong>/usr/www/users/username/</strong>.</p>
  
  <p>Here's what I've been trying (but obviously it's not working):
  (~/public_html/dev/cake/app/webroot/.htaccess)  </p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;IfModule mod_rewrite.c&gt;  
      RewriteEngine On  
      RewriteBase /usr/www/users/username/dev/cake/app/webroot/ 
      RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d  
      RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f  
      RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?url=$1 [QSA,L]  
  &lt;/IfModule&gt;  
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to change anything (the 404 message remains that same).  Thoughts?</p>