I just started a little project to make my life easier when starting little projects. It's called quickproject and it creates the skeleton of a project for me. Here's an example of how I might use it:

* (quickproject:make-project "~/src/sitescraper/" :depends-on '(drakma cxml cl-ppcre)) #p"/Users/xach/src/sitescraper/"

That function call creates a bunch of files with the appropriate contents:

README.txt has a note to write more about the project

has a note to write more about the project sitescraper.asd defines the system and includes whatever :depends-on bits I passed to make-project

defines the system and includes whatever bits I passed to package.lisp defines a package named "SITESCRAPER"

defines a package named "SITESCRAPER" sitescraper.lisp has the beginning of my project. Hacks and glory await!

It also extends the ASDF registry so I can immediately use (asdf:load-system 'sitescraper) to get started.