django STATIC_URL variable is empty

Question

Pretty popular question on here...

My template is rendering, but the {{ STATIC_URL }} variable is either empty or non-existent. I am using django 1.4.

Using the variable in my template:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="{{ STATIC_URL }}app/backbone_project/core.css">

Opening up the console in my browser I see that this is the URL being requested: http://machine-name:8000/backbone/app/backbone_project/core.css So, STATIC_URL is not returning anything, i.e. if I take it out of the template the URL stays the same.

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="app/backbone_project/core.css">

also returnshttp://machine-name:8000/backbone/app/backbone_project/core.css.

EDIT

My settings.py file did not have TEMPLATE_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS by default so I did not think it was required. I have added it now like this:

TEMPLATE_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS = (
    'django.core.context_processors.static',
)

There is an error after doing so: Put 'django.contrib.auth.context_processors.auth' in your TEMPLATE_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS setting in order to use the admin application. So, I added what it suggested like this:

TEMPLATE_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS = (
    'django.contrib.auth.context_processors.auth',
    'django.core.context_processors.static',
)

The end result here is the same initial problem described above.

EDIT 2

I have removed TEMPLATE_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS completely from my settings (as it was in the default implementation of the project.) This is the code of my view:

views.py (not much to see here):

def homepage(request):
    return render_to_response('backbone_project/index.html', {'data':'none'})

EDIT 3

I changed my view to use context_instance=RequestContext(request) so that now it looks like this:

from django.template import RequestContext # and other imports

def homepage(request):
    return render_to_response('backbone_project/index.html', {'data':'none'}, context_instance=RequestContext(request))

The initial problem still persists.