Confusion about Static Files

I am experienced with Python but new to Django and web development in general. I am struggling to understand its static files system from the documentation. It seems like I have to set multiple settings variables and create multiple folders in order to get the server to accomplish the simple task of "finding" these files. After toying with it for a few hours I haven't been able to get the static files system to work and and have resorted to the following system which is probably a very bad idea:

In views.py:

from django.http import HttpResponse

from django.shortcuts import render_to_response

from django.template import RequestContext

import datetime

import os.path

import settings

statictypes = {".css": "text/css",

               ".js": "text/javascript"}

def servestatic(request, filename):

    fullfilename = os.path.join(settings.STATIC_ROOT, filename)

    ext = os.path.splitext(filename)[1]

    return HttpResponse(open(fullfilename).read(), content_type=statictypes[ext])

And in urls.py:

from django.conf.urls import patterns, include, url

import mysite.views as views

staticextensions = [ext[1:] for ext in views.statictypes.keys()]

staticextstring = '|'.join(staticextensions)

urlpatterns = patterns('',

...

    (r"([^/]+\.(?:%s))$" % staticextstring, views.servestatic)

)

This actually works (and I could optimize it by caching the static file contents in memory rather than continually rereading them), but of course it's circumventing Django's built-in system for managing static files. My project architecture looks like this:

mysite

|

|--manage.py

|--mysite

   |

   |__init__.py

   |settings.py

   |urls.py

   |views.py

   |wgsi.py

   |--static

   |  |

   |  |--jquery.js

   |  |--TestFormat.css

   |

   |--templates

      |

      |--TestTemplate.html

At the beginning, the documentation page mentions, "For small projects, this isn't a big deal, because you can just keep the static files somewhere your web server can find it." This sounds like the simple solution I'm looking for; what does it mean and how do I do it? I'm also frequently confused by how when I created the project it created two nested folders with the same name. Which is considered to be the "project root"?

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