Well, I wrote a simple blog engine after finishing the chapter although I don't use a database here, the blog is saved directly to disk (http://github.com/l0stman/Blog).

The biggest hurdle with Common Lisp is configuring the system correctly because there's no out of the box solution. Although there's a lot of library -- http://www.cliki.net is a great resource -- figuring out how to use asdf-install is a bit painful. I took me almost four days to figure out how to launch Hunchentoot as a daemon at startup under FreeBSD (http://github.com/l0stman/Hunchentoot-daemon). In my case, the lisp server itself lays behind nginx as a proxy. The latter serves the static pages too. Here's nginx's configuration:

     server {
        listen       80;
        server_name  localhost;

        location / {
            root   /usr/local/www/nginx;
            # Use absract URL for static pages
            try_files $uri.html $uri/index.html $uri $uri.txt @fallback;
        }

        location @fallback {
            return 404;
        }

        # redirect server error pages to the static page /50x.html
        #
        error_page   500 502 503 504  /50x.html;
        location = /50x.html {
            root   /usr/local/www/nginx-dist;
        }

        # Tunnel all requests where the URI path begins with "/ht"
        # to a Hunchentoot server listening on 127.0.0.1:8080
        #
        location /ht/ {
            rewrite ^/ht/(.*)$ /$1 break;
            proxy_pass   http://127.0.0.1:8080;
            proxy_redirect http://127.0.0.1:8080 /ht;
            proxy_read_timeout 300;
        }
    }