Whether it could survive a lot of pageloads, like when submitting to HN and it gets traction, 100% depends on the blog software.
It won't run Wordpress well because that software is ridiculously heavy, and I frankly don't have good examples of database-based blog software aside from something I wrote myself. Mine still does multiple mariadb queries per pageload, so it's not as though it's extremely lightweight, but page generation comes out to a few milliseconds on a laptop with a CPU from 2012 inside. This software would survive the HN homepage easily.
I would estimate that anything that can handle >10 requests per second will survive the HN homepage, but if you're on the edge of 10r/s then perhaps it might be slower during the busiest minutes. If you would use static page generation (like jekyll, though I'm personally not a fan of how jekyll works it's the most well-known example) then the pi will definitely survive serving those static pages easily.
> I would like it to at least be a little nicer looking
The looks don't make it heavier or less heavy. Having a few style rules applied to the page is a few extra bytes per pageload, but they're not going to make the difference between it working or it not working.
Is this worth while to do? I'm concerned about using a pi, because micro-sd cards seem to be notoriously bad for corrupting data in less than ideal power situations.