How to serve Django Statics (and not go insane)

There's something I'm not clear about with respect to the stated problem. I have wrestled with the Django static dance myself, but the most obvious solution (to me at least) was to add a `location` section to my nginx config pointing to my static assets path.

I get all the same benefits named in the article; such as gzip, though I have to build my scripts locally ahead of time (which is trivial via Grunt).

But served this way, that route never touches the framework itself. At a glance, it seems that letting nginx deal with those assets would be much faster in terms of response time rather than the alternative of routing through Django.

Am I missing something obvious here?

Have you measured the change from standalone to embedded images in the CSS? Is it really worth the increase in size (due to base64) and the lack of parallelization?

How do I get to your website from your blog? I'm viewing it on my phone and there's no obvious link.