Wednesday's eclipse has come and gone, and so have the two pages we built for it — the "Eclipse in Belgium" hub and the live glasses stock tracker are now retired and redirect here. Before we take them down for good, we wanted to share how it went, because it went better than we expected.
The numbers
Over the roughly day and a half the pages were live, 5,537 people visited, from 1,948 different devices. That's not from an ad campaign or a push notification blast — it's word of mouth, shared links, and people searching for where to find eclipse glasses at the last minute. Traffic climbed steadily through the morning of eclipse day itself, from a trickle at dawn to hundreds of visits an hour by midday, which is exactly the organic curve you'd hope to see: no artificial spike, just more people finding it as the day went on.
The stock tracker was the real experiment — a live, crowd-sourced list of which Belgian shops still had eclipse glasses, built and updated entirely by readers. 627 of you submitted a stock report, covering 39 shops across the country. That's 627 people who saw a shop with (or without) stock and took ten seconds to tell everyone else. We didn't write most of that page — you did.
Who was reading
English led at about three-quarters of visits, with Dutch next at roughly a fifth, then French, then a smaller but real German readership. shortnews.be is built to read the same in Dutch, French and English, and it showed — this wasn't an English-only page that happened to get some other traffic, all three languages saw real use.
Thank you
None of this needed anyone to make an account, and none of it needed anyone to already have the app. That's the whole idea behind shortnews.be — the news, and now a live community tool built around it, should be one tap away, not a signup form away. If that's the kind of thing you want more of, the best way to stay associated with us is to get the app — it's where the next breaking story, poll, or live page like this one will actually show up first.
Thank you for reading, for reporting stock, and for spending part of Wednesday evening looking up at the sky with us. We'll see you for the next one.