Thanks for the suggestion, besson3c, however I've already looked at Fink, DarwinPorts, and MacPorts and none really do what I want. There are really only a few programs here and there that I need to compile from scratch, and it's just so much easier to do it myself than to fight MacPorts when it fails to compile something or when one of the ports lags a few versions behind the one that I need.
Thanks for the plist, Peter. Sadly, it looks like the MacPorts guys are doing a lot more magic than just using their plist file. Looks like I'll be sticking with StartupItems, which isn't ideal, but is actually how Apple does it with their default Apache install, anyway.