# Ancient Web: Homo Ludens Built a Homepage for Every Hobby One Man Could Collect

Manfred Mornhinweg's Homo Ludens homepage branches into amateur radio, antique radios, electronics, flying, photography, music, model airplanes, mechanics, kayaking and more.

2026-07-20
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Switchboard Tech Services


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Part of the [Ancient Web Collection](https://switchboardtechservices.com/articles/ancient-web-collection/).

Some personal websites choose a subject. Manfred Mornhinweg's Homo Ludens homepage chooses the person and lets every subject follow him home.

[Visit Homo Ludens](http://ludens.cl/Index.html)

The site's premise is right in the name: *homo ludens*, the playing human. Mornhinweg introduces the pages as the toys, games and hobbies of one specimen, then splits himself into a collection of mock subspecies.

There is *homo ludens radiactivus* for amateur radio, *radiohistoricus* for antique radios, *electronicus* for electronics projects, *volatrix* for free flight, *nauticus* for a homemade folding kayak and sailing, *musicus* for music, *aeromodellisticus* for model aircraft, *andinensis* for climbing, *photographicus* for photography and *mechanicus* for tools and car repair. There are more.

The navigation sounds like a joke, but the material behind it is substantial. Mornhinweg has published electronics projects, restorations, technical explanations, photographs and long accounts of things he built or repaired. His pages have circulated for years among electronics hobbyists because they contain the sort of detail that tends to come only from somebody who actually constructed the circuit, opened the inverter or rebuilt the radio.

The site states its design philosophy plainly: content rather than special effects, bells and whistles. That sentence has aged extremely well. The pages remain quick to load and easy to read because most of the machinery is simply text, photographs and links.

There is also something distinctly pre-platform about organizing a website around a whole human being. Modern publishing tends to reward specialization. Pick a niche, stay in it, train the audience. Homo Ludens does the opposite. The unifying subject is curiosity itself.

For webmasters, that makes the structure worth studying. The homepage works as a map of interests, while individual sections can become as deep as they need to be. Nobody has to pretend antique radios and homemade kayaks belong in the same SEO category. They belong together because the same person cared about both.

Homo Ludens is still online and still refreshingly unconcerned with personal-brand consistency.

[Explore Manfred Mornhinweg's Homo Ludens site](http://ludens.cl/Index.html)

Part of the [Ancient Web Collection](https://switchboardtechservices.com/articles/ancient-web-collection/).

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Author: Switchboard Tech Services

Published: 2026-07-20T23:13:48+00:00