Yes. It does take a lot of time! But it's worth the time to do a good job, because the returns are nonlinear with the quality IMO.
You want something good enough to make it on social news sites, not just for the traffic spike but because it will make search engines notice you. I have some posts that are just "here's how I solved this error message" or similar and I'm not posting those on HN but I want people searching that message to find my blog so I can help them. When I get a post on HN then over time those other posts get more search traffic.
I got my most interesting and fun job through my blog, when the CTO of a startup read a post on HN and reached out to hire me. And at that time my blog only had two posts, so it wasn't like I was a prolific regular blogger. I just had one thing interesting enough to make it on HN.
I just moved to self hosting my blog at https://james.darpinian.com and trying to post a little more often. Honestly self hosting is probably not worth the trouble. A hosted platform with a custom domain is probably the sweet spot.
You want something good enough to make it on social news sites, not just for the traffic spike but because it will make search engines notice you. I have some posts that are just "here's how I solved this error message" or similar and I'm not posting those on HN but I want people searching that message to find my blog so I can help them. When I get a post on HN then over time those other posts get more search traffic.
I got my most interesting and fun job through my blog, when the CTO of a startup read a post on HN and reached out to hire me. And at that time my blog only had two posts, so it wasn't like I was a prolific regular blogger. I just had one thing interesting enough to make it on HN.
I just moved to self hosting my blog at https://james.darpinian.com and trying to post a little more often. Honestly self hosting is probably not worth the trouble. A hosted platform with a custom domain is probably the sweet spot.