I finally got around to an idea I had about 3 years ago when I remembered my Dad’s old medicine chest. Inside there is a classic vial of “Otto’s Cure: The German Remedy”. How fun would a Snake Oil generator be? It turns out, lots of fun, once you load it up with all the historical/hysterical benefits of Snake Oil (and some extra items too).
After collecting a lot of images of actual panaceas, I went digging over at FontSquirrel for some suitable webfonts, and started coding away. At first I thought about using svg for the graphical components. I was quickly dissuaded when I found that browsers still lack support for text wrapping. So, I went back to using background layers which works pretty well, except for in the randomly generated black boxes, where the text is often the wrong color.
It still needs some work. I have some ingredient lists and other ideas percolating. Eventually I plan on making it customizable. Some of the background images are a tad large as well, causing the initial downloads to be slow. Once they are cached on your browser things go faster.
Try it out, and if you have suggestions, let me know in the comments!