Permissions for apache directory

[Jon Jahren]

Hi.
I've set up a webserver at home now, which works fine, however, I've set
documentroot to /var/www/htdocs, and this is not writeable by my regular
user, and I would like to know what's the most elegant approach for
making html writable to a regular user? I could do chown -R
<user> /var/www/htdocs, but I don't want to put my system at risk, and
using /home/<user>/public_html gives me "permission denied" when trying
to access it via a browser.
I really don't want to be logged in as root when doing stuff, because I
usually end up mocking up something.
Thanks in advance
Jon