Is there a way to install Bitweaver to a local, offline machine so that a person could just test things? I would like to play around with Bitweaver on my own PC before installing it to a server, to see if it is right for me.

.
Yes, this can be done quite easily.

All you need, is to have a web server running. Which can be setup local only.

What OS are you running?
.

I'm running Windows XP.

.
Well, that's a bit of a pity for you.

Install Wamp5.
.

I'm doing just what you want. I've got XP Pro, with Apache, PHP, MySQL and bitweaver 2.1.0 alpha running on my box at home. Online I've got Apache on a linux shared-host, with PHP, MySQL, and bitweaver 2.0

I'll help you however I can, but I didn't use WAMP. I installed each piece separately. I tried some flavor of an All-In-One package, but I couldn't find a package that had the correctly mix&matched versions I needed.

So lemme know...

WAMP is probably going to be the easiest way to do it.

If you're up for a challenge, you can try IIS and MSDE - I need to do this myself soon, so I'll make sure I put up a Wiki page about it. Happy to help out if you get stuck - just post here.