Re: [phpOpenTracker-general] some first-time setup questions

On Wed, 5 Apr 2006 04:16 am, E. Veelo wrote:
> 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?

Read the docs for those non-essential packages. For most functions you can 
output in other formats which will allow you to choose your own graphing 
function. For instance, I prefer to use this package for my bar charts 
http://www.phpclasses.org/browse/package/2601.html

> - 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?

Yes - either dump the DNS lookups or put a web bug at the bottom of your page. 
I didn't like my browser looking like like it was still expecting data for a 
few seconds, felt it made my site look like it had a 'problem', so chose to 
dump the DNS lookups.

> - 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?

According to the docs (I have not done this) you can do that using both web 
bug parameters, and a direct inclusion, to gather the data you want. You'd 
need to write your own functions to extract the data as you needed it.

Again I took a simpler option that provides me with client browser stats. As 
well as phpOpenTracker I use http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AWStats with a 
plug-in to get that information. The plugin actually includes a javascript 
function, so if license permits, you may be able to base your javascript on 
that function. 

Cheers
Richard