I had a problem I wanted to solve at work. Sometimes clients will call or write in asking for help, but they can’t remember which email address their account is under. This is a problem because that’s generally how we look up accounts. We can look them up by their site address (which they usually can remember), but that can take a while, and requires a couple extra steps if they’re using a custom domain. Not something you want to deal with while you have someone waiting on the phone!
Screenshot of the Find User Bookmarklet page
I’d recently discovered that the user ID number can be found in the source code of almost any member site. While this number is pretty innocuous, it can be used to perform a search in our administrative back end.
From that, the path was clear. Create a bookmarklet that searches the source code for a user ID and, if found, directs the visitor to their account in our admin site. My department (client services) has found it pretty useful, so I’ve shared it with our prod and development teams too. This is the first time I’ve created a tool that is actively being used by others.