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The Bottom Line
ActiveRefresh is a powerful aggregator (RSS, non-syndicated sites, email) and flexible news presenter (with filters and customizable display). Unfortunately, ActiveRefresh lacks virtual folders to have news organized automatically.
Pros
- ActiveRefresh checks non-syndicated sites, email
- News display can be customized, filtered and adapted
- You can post to a blog from ActiveRefresh
Cons
- ActiveRefresh lacks virtual folders
- Constructing site filters is not trivial in ActiveRefresh
Description
- ActiveRefresh aggregates RSS/Atom feeds, web sites, POP email accounts, and Yahoo! Mail.
- ActiveRefresh has a two-pane interface. The news pane is customizable with flexible HTML templates.
- Filters let you include or exclude news items matching keywords, and feeds can be searched.
- ActiveRefresh can announce news (or new mail) via sound, system tray and optionally mail.
- You can have news items automatically archived and purged by ActiveRefresh.
- An integrated blogging tool lets you blog from ActiveRefresh (supports LiveJournal, MT, Blogger).
- You can set up on-the-fly folders and save references to blog items for later use in ActiveRefresh.
- ActiveRefresh can import from and export to OPML files.
- ActiveRefresh supports Windows 9x/ME/NT/2000/3/XP.
Guide Review - ActiveRefresh 2.2 - RSS News Feed Reader
No, ActiveRefresh is no whey drink. It swallows and transforms news from many sources, though. It's easy to add RSS feeds and POP or Yahoo! Mail mailboxes, and you can make ActiveRefresh extract news from non-syndicated web sites as well. Constructing such a filter isn't exactly easy, though (fortunately, it is also hardly necessary).
The output end is equally flexible, but here, too, ActiveRefresh lacks easy to use templates. You can filter feeds for keywords and search all current items. It would be great if these searches could be saved to virtual folders.
ActiveRefresh comes with another nice tool for organizing news items, though: you can set up custom folders dubbed "Memories" on the fly and save references to articles easily. ActiveRefresh comes with a simple blogging tool that makes posting news items easy and fast.
