Static sites deserve better than a CMS.
You built a fast Astro site. Then your client asked how to edit it. Now you’re choosing between adding a headless CMS, handing them a page builder, or making every change yourself. I built Asteriks so you don’t have to choose.
My walkthrough: a client changes an Astro site on the page, from gulp to publish, and you see the file change it makes.
- Gulp it.Point Asteriks at what needs changing.
- Say it.Describe the change in plain English.
- Or type it.Edit the words yourself.
- Ship it.Publish. The change is a real edit to a file in your project.
I got tired of managing CMSs for static sites.
I’m Patrick. At Policygenius, I built the content infrastructure and ran the site, in one of the fiercest SEO markets there is: organic insurance search, more than a million visitors a year. I went static-first for speed, on Gatsby and Contentful.
Since then, as a fractional CTO, I’ve moved sites off Gatsby and built on Sanity and Next.js. Different stacks, same problem. The pages were the easy part. Making them editable meant a CMS, a content model, webhooks and rebuilds, all so someone could change a headline. And it was the same whether that someone was a client, a marketing team or me.
AI is good at editing flat files now. So Asteriks puts the editing on the page: whoever’s editing changes the words there, or in the Editor if they’d rather type, and Asteriks edits the files in your repo. You keep the code.
I packaged what I learned into Asteriks, so you can bring it to the sites you build.
Patrick · LinkedIn
Where we’re going, there are no CMSs.
1990s
Hand-written HTML
New headline? Email the webmaster.
2000s
The CMS
Fill in a form. Hope the page looks right.
2010s
Page builders
Drag, drop, and move your site onto their platform.
2020s
AI generators
A whole site in a minute. Then the client wants one word changed.
Now
Asteriks
Edit the actual page. Change the actual files. Keep the actual website.
Your website is just files.
Change a headline on the page and Asteriks changes that line in your .astro file. No proprietary format, just the same files you’d edit by hand.
On the page
Fresh bread, out of the oven by 7.
src/pages/index.astro
12 <section class="hero">
13 <h1>Fresh bread, out of the oven by 7.</h1>
14 <p>Sourdough, rye and seasonal loaves</p>- Portable. It’s your project. Host it wherever you like.
- Reversible. Snapshots you can go back to in one step.
- Yours. Stop using Asteriks and your site keeps working.
- Astro first. Built for the Astro sites you already ship.
Show it what you mean.
Your client edits the page. Asteriks edits the files. You keep the code.