[phpOpenTracker-general] some first-time setup questions

Hello list,

I've just installed POT and it seems to be doing just fine, next I'll 
throw some extensions at it and see how I survive that, but I'm 
loving it already. I do have some questions though, here we go:

- what is the merge table option for, why would I use it and what 
would be the benefits?
- I got POT running on my shared host, but can I get the other 
packages needed for graphs etc install on a shared host as well?
- should the script be called before sending any html to the browser 
because of the use of cookies? I'd prefer to have it at the end so 
the page rendering isn't delayed because of DNS lookups or other 
processes the POT performs, or could those processes be split into a 
separate action independent from that browser call?
- extendibility is one of the POT pillars so I'm sure this is 
possible, but how and how difficult would it be to expand it's 
tracking with web bug collected variables such is screen size, 
javascript version, java enabled, plugins installed etc. and to turn 
this into some usable statistics?

Feel free to point me to previous threads if any of this has been 
discussed before, I didn't find a search function in the archives.
Many thanks for your time!

Best regards,
Edwin