So for whatever reason after updating to OS X Mountain Lion 10.8.2 I couldn’t access http://localhost/~username.  Every time I would try to load it I got the following error:

Forbidden

You don’t have permission to access /~bpauley/ on this server.

So in order to fix this you have to perform a few steps.

1.  You need to create a file on the desktop and call it username.conf where username is your short username.
2. Past the following contents into the file you just created and again change username to your short username.

<Directory “/Users/username/Sites/”>
Options Indexes MultiViews
AllowOverride None
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>

3.  Copy the file you just created on your desktop into the /etc/apache2/users folder.  You can do this by opening up a terminal window and typing the following command switching out username for again your short username:

sudo cp /Users/username/Desktop/username.conf /etc/apache2/users/username.conf

When you are prompted enter your administrator password.
4.  Enter the following command in the terminal window again changing username to the short username:

sudo chown root:wheel /etc/apache2/users/username.conf

5.  The final steps requires you to stop and start apache so type the following two commands back to back in the terminal window:

sudo apachectl stop
sudo apachectl start

You are done do a refresh and it will work 🙂