Now I'm really confused. Ken's example does exactly what I want when I create a gridify function and call it from a page macro (defmacro templates at the bottom of the email). But if I put the function body into the page macro, (see second example), it doesn't work. Rather, it prints the entire table, complete with tr and td with no string - then drops the list of strings after the table Both use exactly the same macros to generate the page and it is a cut and paste job. Somehow putting the function body into the macro is changing how the loops work: WORKS (defun gridify (x &optional (col 5)) "given a list of strings, put them in an html table (returned as a string) with |col| columns." (with-html-output-to-string (var nil) (:table (loop for xp on x by (lambda (p) (nthcdr col p)) do (htm (:tr (loop for i upto (1- col) for (id name) in xp do (htm (:td (:a :href (format nil "~a~a" "countries-display?id=" id) (str name))))))))))) (defpage-easy-slp gridify-countries "Countries Grid" "/gridify-countries" () (let* ((data-query "select id,name from countries order by name ") (results (query data-query)) (col 5)) (gridify results col))) DOESNT WORK (defpage-easy-slp countries-grid "Countries Grid" "/countries-grid" () (let* ((data-query "select id,name from countries order by name ") (x (query data-query)) (col 5)) (with-html-output-to-string (var nil) (:table (loop for xp on x by (lambda (p) (nthcdr col p)) do (htm (:tr (loop for i upto (1- col) for (id name) in xp do (htm (:td (:a :href (format nil "~a~a" "countries-display?id=" id) (str name)))))))))))) DEF MACROS (defmacro page-template (title &body body) `(with-html-output-to-string (*standard-output* nil :prologue t :indent t) (:html (:head (:link :rel "stylesheet" :type "text/css" :href "/css/screen.css" :media "screen") (:title (str (format nil " ~a" ,title)))) (:body (:div :class "container" (:div :class "column span-24" (str ,@body)))))))) (defmacro defpage-easy-slp (name title uri parameter-list &body body) `(define-easy-handler (,name :uri ,uri :default-request-type :both) ,parameter-list (page-template ,title ,@body)))