I typically do all my coding in a development sandbox, but with wordpress I was having trouble with the url settings. My local development environment had a url of http://dev/gh, but the public url is greghostetler.com. So once I changed the url in the wordpress wp-options table I could no longer access my local environment, because it would redirect to the public url.

The url in the options table can be overridden in the wp-config file on my dev environment.

define('WP_SITEURL', 'http://dev/gh');