You have given the most thorough treatment of this subject I have found anywhere. It might even be a great Meditation or part of a tutorial on C::A. I only wish I could ++ this more than once.

In my other C::A based apps, I have written a runmode called "dispatcher" that just serves my static pages. It just felt weird - as you said "separation of church and state please." So, since it was a little uncomfortable, I thought I would root around a little to see if there was a better solution. It looks like this is the best solution in a shared environment. If I ever move to a VPS, then I will be able to look at a more integrated solution with mod_perl and Apache. For now, it will all go through C::A.

Thanks for taking the time to share your perspective on this. I feel much better about serving my content this way. As you said, it is slightly slower, but very consistent and easy to implement in any shared hosting environment.

I only wish for shell access. I am familiar with symlinks, and pretty comfortable at the command line, but my reseller hosting doesn't provide a shell.