I'm trying to set up a WordPress site on a LAMP stack on Debian 6.0. From the WordPress documentation (and my experience on shared hosts) the correct permissions should be as follows
All files should be owned by your user account, and should be writable by you. Any file that needs write access from WordPress should be group-owned by the user account used by the webserver.
I've managed to setup my server to have 755 permissions on all directories and 644 on all files. However, WordPress is still not able to create folders for uploads and upgrades. I'm guessing that this is because WordPress is not running as my user account, but as www-data and therefore it needs group write permissions.
How do I make WordPress run as my account? Or am I on the wrong track?
I'm new to this, having outgrown shared hosting and setting up my first VPS. I would really appreciate it if you could answer in as much detail as possible.