Widgets, plugins and IE conditional comments

Hi everyone

I’ve been building my first custom WP site on a local XAMPP installation. I’m nearly ready to launch, but I have a couple of issues that might be resolved quicker with a bit of guidance!

1. Feedburner – I have the understanding that have to wait until my site is live before I can configure feedburner, but I wouldn’t mind checking out the feedburner reader for the sidebar before uploading to the remote server – is this possible?

2. MyBlogLog – I have made some customised elements to the sidebar, so I’m considering leaving the dynamic sidebar alone for now – even though it works fine.

Everything I want has been easily coded in, and I want to do the same with MyBlogLog. I’ve tried the MyBlogLog WP installation tutorial, but the widget doesn’t show anything when added to the sidebar, except for a couple of li elements. Is this because I haven’t registered the URL or had any readers yet? Surely the table structure exists even though no data has been added?

I also got a little confused when the tutorial suggested that the MyBlogLog widget could be installed straight into the sidebar – this is exactly what I want, but the tutorial stated that the ‘widget code’ should be copied into a list in the sidebar. Does this mean that should just copy all the code for the MyBlogLog widget straight out of the Plugin Editor in WP admin?
I take pride in my site’s presentation, so I want the MyBlogLog table to fit with the theme – is there any way that I can try it out or see how it looks before uploading?

3. OpenID – I’ve tried the OpenID plugin, and it looks like I need to add another library to get it working – should I leave it for now and wait until OpenID has more users, or get it configured now?

4. Google Analytics and or Mint – I want to track stats, and I’ve heard that these are the best. Would you recommend one over the other, or a combination of both?

5. IE’s lack of standards compliance – My design looks great in FF and Opera, but it needs a separate stylesheet to accommodate IE. Are conditional comments the best way of doing this? I’m actually still running IE6 at the moment because I haven’t got round to installing one of the solutions to running both IE7 and IE6 at the same time.

6. Digg Plugin – can anyone recommend a good Digg plugin? I just want to have the Digg icon without any text at the bottom of each post. I’ve achieved this with del.icio.us, so hopefully it shouldn’t be too difficult.

Any help is very much appreciated
NC