Is it worth having a local offline setup of your site on your laptop?

I have been planning to write this post since a very long time, however with all the craziness around me surrounding my 2.5 years old son, I wasn't able to complete the draft.

Just few months back, I was planning to learn "all-things-wordpress", and I came across this functionality on Windows 8, where through Microsoft Webmatrix, you can install wordpress on your local machine, create your own local desktop site and have your own control panel, database etc.

Your site url would look something like http://localhost:12345/ and your admin login will be on http://localhost:12345/wp-admin/

I did my local site setup just to learn things, however, now as I have started learning more about themes and plugins, I can see how valuable this local set up has been for me so far.

I can play around with multiple themes, change the stuffs, coding etc. Test new wordpress themes, before actually deciding to install any of these themes or plugins on my priceless "online" site.

Ofcourse, this local set up is only accessible to me, for obvious reasons, but I would definitely recommend you to get it done on your laptops/pcs too if you have Windows 8 installed, if you hate all-things-constant and are quite excited about playing around with thousands of themes and plugins, without actually breaking your site or user experience.

You can check the details about this here : http://www.microsoft.com/web/wordpress

I hope it helps! :)

Another update on my growth - I got few more Amazon sales in my kitty and these sales were of bigger stuffs, so got more bucks! :D

To your success!

Kimi