How to make an easy Election 2008 dashboard widget in 10 seconds

This tip requires OSX “Leopard” 10.5 on your Mac or PC. (Update: Stageninja has instructions for Windows)

1. Go to Google News with Safari.

2. Right click on its little electoral map, then select “Open in Dashboard.”

3. The bounding box will appear. Click on the map, then click “Add.”

Voila! No more compulsive, productivity-destroying trawls around CNN.com or Pollster.com!

1. [Anonymous]

   You can do this with Vista by using the minibrowser gadget (http://minibrowser.info/downloads) and pasting STAGENINJA’s URL in there. You will need to adjust the size of the window to display the entire map (370×240 worked for me) and then set the refresh rate as desired.

2. [gwizah]

   How about posting the actual link to the actual map?

3. [Rob Beschizza]

   I did. It’s step 1: the minimap is at Google News. It’s automagically refreshed with javascript, so linking to a specific image will likely not work.

4. [pigFoot]

   Took a couple tries to get this to work: the bottom 2/3 of the map kept getting clipped.

   Try right clicking in the whitespace to the right of the map.

5. [dingolishious]

   didn’t show up when I went to news.google.com but I found it here:

   http://maps.google.com/help/maps/elections/#2008_election

6. [mujadaddy]

   “requires OSX “Leopard” 10.5 on your… PC.”

   You’re funny, Rob. That’s why I’m going to kill you last.

7. [stageNinja]

   You can do the same thing using a windows machine.

   goto Start->Control Panel->Display->Desktop->Customize Desktop->Web

   Click ‘New’ A wizard will pop up copy this link into the wizard http://www.gmodules.com/ig/ifr?url=http://mw1.google.com/mw-news/us_el/static-results-gadget.xml&synd=open

   Click OK, Click OK, Click Apply, Click OK

   There you go an election widget for your PC

   Note: to refresh the widget right click it and refresh.