Troubleshooting namebased virtual websites

[John Hudak <jjhudak@xxxxxxxxx>]

I am having an issue where none of the three virtual websites I've created are being served when requested. I basically followed the approach documented here:
http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/412

I am running Ubuntu server 8.04 LTS. My router successfully forwards the incomming page request to my server (193.168.0.110).  I am able to serve a single site, that is set up slightly differently than the three virtual sites.  The main difference is that the document root is in my home directory (/home/me/my_website_docs).  

When a request comes in for one of the virtual sites, i.e. www.example.com, the apache error log records (from-:tail -f /var/log/apache2/error.log):
[Tue Jul 10 10:00:49 2010] [error] [client xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx] File does not exist: /htdocs

I've set the /var/www file protection to: 766 for all the files to be served. The owner is apache.

I put a 'dummy' index.html file in each of the htdoc directories. 
I have tried a number of things including: eliminating the domain directory structure and just serving from /var/www/, making the sites-available file for each domain minimal by just specifying: domain name, doc root, alias,.  I've done a few other things that I can't remember at this point.

So, any suggestions as to how to troubleshoot this problem?  One of my questions is what is this error really telling me?  is it looking for a file "/htdocs"?  Where is it looking for this file? If it is looking for "/htdocs" why??? and why not the DirectoryIndex of index.html as I specified in sites-available??

Suggestions are really appreciated as I am dead-ended on this one....
Thank you!
John