I learned about Common Lisp from a friend a while back, and being a math guy, thought it was certainly the coolest programming language I'd seen. I had taken a class in Haskell, so functional programming was already a big interest of mine. I played with Common Lisp a bit: I use stumpwm , and have done tons of configuration to it, and I made some physics projects in CL. By the time I decided to make a website / blog, I had a few parameters for the language: functional, good library support, and preferably lispy. And then I found Clojure: the language with an answer for everything. Since it's on the JVM it has tons of libraries; for example Compojure (HTTP routing library), Hiccup (HTML compiler), JDBC (java database connectivity for SQL), and so on. And, to top it all off:This was the only reasonably choice for a lisp lover like me. Yeah.. I could've used Node.js, but that didn't seem nearly as fun to me (although the more documentation may have been nice). This project is gonna be broken into a few parts: 1. Routing ( Ring Compojure ) 2. HTML Generation ( Hiccup ) 3. Databasing (PSQL, JDBC ) 4. User Authentication ( Buddy ) 5. Design.. (difficult) I'm gonna starting walking through how I built each part, and every article I'll probably rewrite things that I wrote poorly the first time.