After wading through all the options, many of which included mastering system options that I don't care about, and have nothing to do with the problem I want to solve, I decided to give MAMP a try, and so far so good. It's doing what I want to do, without having to enable root access.
Last update: Thursday, June 3, 2010; 4:01:16 PM
~About the Author~
Dave Winer, 55, is a visiting scholar at NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. He pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software; former contributing editor at Wired Magazine, research fellow at Harvard Law School, entrepreneur, and investor in web media companies. A native New Yorker, he received a Master's in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, a Bachelor's in Mathematics from Tulane University and currently lives in New York City.
"RSS was born in 1997 out of the confluence of Dave Winer's 'Really Simple Syndication' technology, used to push out blog updates, and Netscape's 'Rich Site Summary', which allowed users to create custom Netscape home pages with regularly updated data flows." - Tim O'Reilly.
Thanks for all the great 
scriptingnews1mail at gmail dot com.