This was a good tutorial.  I got it working with Ubuntu 8.10 server. I also used kabewm's suggestion (in comments).  No problem.   I also added a couple more fields to the table: Lastname, Firstname, comments, and email.  Just for user tracking purposes...

 The one thing that I had hoped to do but so far have been unable, is to have the user default to their home dir or a folder off of their home dir (like /home/user/www).  I tried symbolic links and that didn't work and I'm not seeing an option to follow sym links in the man page for vsftpd.conf.  If I find the solution, I will post it here.