Ben Ubois of Feedbin:

The Mercury Parser API, made by Postlight, is shutting down.

Mercury Parser is the service that powers a number of popular features on Feedbin. These include: extracting the full content from partial content feeds, viewing the content of links in Feedbin, and displaying articles that are linked to from tweets.

However, this is actually good news, because Postlight open-sourced Mercury Parser, and it has already improved significantly. Bugs have been fixed, results have become more accurate, and in the case of Feedbin, it is now much faster.…

Self-hosting [the open-source Mercury project] also means that I can open up access to this service to Feedbin customers and app developers.… Please get in touch if you’d like to use it in your app, whether your users are logged in to a Feedbin account or not.…

Thanks to Postlight for running Mercury Parser free-of-charge all these years!

Hear, hear!

Similarly, praise goes to Feedbin for contributing to the community like this.

It’s irritating that some sites don’t offer their full article content via their RSS and JSON feeds but Mercury has made it virtually irrelevant. Now that Feedbin are hosting it, even when invoking the Mercury service in an app like Reeder, the full content arrives almost instantaneously. It’s fantastic, especially whilst on mobile.

I enthusiastically subscribe to Feedbin’s service and now I’m even more pleased.