Writing the same thing twice

Recently I wrote a post that turned out to be a duplicate of a post from a month earlier, albeit with an updated idea to add on the original idea. I caught the problem toward the end of the post so I was able to tweak it a bit before publishing.

The challenge I keep running into is not knowing if I’ve already written on a topic. That’s partially a me problem as my memory has always played weird tricks on me. Some things just disappear entirely, never to be recalled, but other things I can remember in vivid detail years later. Because of how the human brain works it’s also likely that I’ll write a topic almost the same way the second time.

Because of my topic checklist I mostly avoid this, but sometimes I forget to check off an item and a month later that sounds like a great thing to write on—of course it does.

Searching my blog’s CMS does no good, and Google occasionally helps, but still misses. What I want is a way to ingest my entire blog before or during writing to search on what I’ve written before—and in some cases I don’t mind just appending an update.

So far every solution I’ve tried hasn’t quite been sufficient. I welcome any ideas.