Did I Already Talk about That?

This morning I sat down to write my daily Olive Tree Genealogy blog post and after some musing, had what I thought was a good idea for a topic. But as I started to write, I wondered if I'd written about it previously! It seemed familiar and I did find it in  the book I keep where I jot down ideas for blog posts as I think of them. But it wasn't marked "Done" so I wasn't sure if I'd written it or not.

I confess that I'm not as organized as I should be, and just because I didn't mark it as published does not mean it wasn't. So I spent some time going through older blog posts to try to see if I'd talked about the idea previously but didn't spot it. However since I've been blogging on Olive Tree Genealogy blog for 10 years and I've written 1,938 posts, I admit I don't recall every single post I've published!

That brings me to something that I'm sure affects other bloggers too - how do you keep track of what you've written? How can I be sure that if I start to write a post about what attributes a good genealogist has, that I haven't already written about it years ago.

I realize it is always okay to revisit an old blog post and ramp it up with new ideas or a new take on it. But with my luck I'd write a post listing the qualities that I believe a good genealogist needs, only to find that I wrote an almost identical piece in 2004 or 2005 or some other year.

Then came the conundrum - should I write the blog post anyway and hope I wasn't repeating myself? I really can't go through almost 2000 posts to see if I can spot it - ugh! Do I forget about the topic? What would you do?

And how do other bloggers handle this problem of possible duplication of posts? Ten years is a long time to try to think back and remember anything, let alone one blog post!

I'm curious as to how others handle this, and what readers would think if they read a blog post and remembered reading a similar one previously.

I can't decide whether to write a post about what attributes I think a good genealogist needs or just let it go in case I've talked about it before.