multisite install in userdir

Hello All,

I recently installed Drupal in my userdir (~username) on an Apache server here at work. It's behaving how I'd expect, but what I want to do is configure it to handle multiple sites. This, however, has proven to be quite difficult.

So, let me give you all the layout of my file system... Within my userdir (/home/user/public_html) directory I have:
/drupal <= Full Drupal install
/drupal/sites/www.example.com.project1 <= A site with a fully configured settings.php file.
/project1 <= Symlinked to drupal

So, I'd like to be able to, from the web, make a request like http://www.example.com/~user/project1 and be presented with contents from the www.example.com.project1 site in my /drupal/sites directory.

But, what I get back is the default Drupal install page; as though I made a request to www.example.com/~user/drupal. I can confirm the multi-site feature works correctly by creating the symlink "/var/www/project1" and pointing it to /home/user/public_html/drupal. This results in my web request (http://www.example.com/project1) rendering the desired result. I think something with the "~user" portion of URL is gumming up the works. Does anyone have any ideas?

Clint