[Answer]-Getting username in Django on every single page regardless of how I got there

Just output the {{ user.username }}. If user is logged, some of auth middleware and django.contrib.auth.context_processors.auth context processor are enabled then the username will be shown.

The middleware takes the user id from the session, loads the User from the db and sets the request.user attribute. Then context processor takes the request.user attribute and injects it into the RequestContext as the user variable.

To make the user variable available in your template you should use the render() shortcut. Or the render_to_response() with the RequestContext as the context_instance argument.