worked great…! Thanks DronNick!

all your comments seem to help everyone, but my old brain is not able to comprehend what to do next.
If anyone is kind enough to take me step by step what to do from the point in my terminal :
Last login: Thu Jul 29 10:00:35 on console
basias-MacBook:~ basia$

I will be most grateful.
by the way, this error started after running the upgrades, and shows up on all web pages of my 2 domains and 3 subdomains, and all my tripot.com pages that have many.

thank you in advance
basia

Unix is sure powerful tho – Stellablue

Thanks for the tip!

I DO NOT recommend giving EVERYONE read permission to your home directory, nor do I recommend the method described above of changing “Allow from all” in /private/etc/apache2/httpd.conf.

Rather, I recommend creating a separate “/Users/Shared” directory with a corresponding weak Shared user account, then hosting content from the Shared directory.

You can also use /Users/Shared to keep things like photos, music, virtual disk images, and other items that you do not necessarily wish FileVault to encrypt.

As root, do these steps:

# create /Users/Shared and user Shared with no login capability:

mkdir /Users/Shared
mkdir /Users/Shared/Sites
mkdir /Users/Shared/Sites/images

dscl localhost -create /Local/Default/Users/Shared
dscl . -create /Users/Shared UniqueID 511
[dsexport users.out /Local/Default dsRecTypeStandard:Users ; less users.out to find next UniqueID -- see http://osxdaily.com/2007/10/29/how-to-add-a-user-from-the-os-x-command-line-works-with-leopard/
dscl . -create /Users/Shared UserShell /usr/bin/false # no login for Shared!
dscl . -create /Users/Shared PrimaryGroupID 20 # staff
dscl . -create /Users/Shared NFSHomeDirectory /Users/Shared
# change ownership, permissions
chown -R Shared:staff /Users/Shared
chown -R 775 /Users/Shared

# create apache conf file
cp -p /etc/apache2/users/myusername.conf /etc/apache2/users/Shared.conf
nano /etc/apache2/users/Shared.conf
[Edit first line to use directory "/Users/Shared/Sites/"]
httpd -k restart

# copy over default web pages to /Users/Shared/Sites
cp -p ~myusername/Sites/index.html /Users/Shared/Sites
cp -p ~myusername/Sites/images/macosxlogo.gif /Users/Shared/Sites/images
cp -p ~myusername/Sites/images/apache_pb.gif /Users/Shared/Sites/images
cp -p ~myusername/Sites/images/web_share.gif /Users/Shared/Sites/images

Now log out of root, and either under a new shell (bash/sh/tcsh/whatever) or a new Terminal window, you ought to be able to “cd ~Shared” to get to /Users/Shared. Sanity check your permissions using:
ls -ld /Users/Shared. If you don’t want all staff to have write access to /Users/Shared and below, then:
chmod -R g-w /Users/Shared

Now Stop/Start System Preferences>Sharing>Web Sharing, and point your browser to:

http://localhost/~Shared

That should work. Now host from /Users/Shared without anyone being able access to your home directory. If you edited /private/etc/apache2/httpd.conf to “Allow from all” as default, change this back to “Deny from all” as default, and restart httpd and Web Sharing.