TL;DR version: Coffeesource.net is no longer timing out and you can resume making use of its awesome Backlinks functionality to generate links to your previous posts to go in the bottom of your new posts.
Coffeesource.net has been suffering a Gateway timeout issues ever since the Steem Python default node was deprecated.
Previously the code was using the default constructor. The constructors have all been updated to use working nodes. Additionally, the list of nodes is now configurable via the typical settings.py file with other site-wide settings. Correcting the pages that made use of the api consisted of adding the appropriate import and modifying the constructors to make use of the value from the settings module.
A global Steem object was removed from the utils module in favor of locally scoped objects and avoiding the construction overhead that would have been incurred just by importing the module. Additionally, the hard-coded limit setting of get_user_posts was made a method parameter that defaults to the old hard-coded value. And some variables were re-scoped to avoid un-necessary construction when a large number of resteemed posts exist in a given users feed.
A global Steem object was removed from the views module to similarly avoid overhead. The settings object now has a decent start at a sane list of steem node endpoints based on the information available at https://developers.steem.io/.
The general_tags module is perhaps the simplest example of the steem api changes needed.
The settings module import was added to this module.
Then the Steem constructor was updated to use the node values from this object.
This was a fairly straightforward patch, but the ramifications of not having it meant the site didn't work.
The application now has a configurable list of steem-python nodes that it can use in case one of the nodes becomes temporarily or even permanently unavailable.
Also, the hard-coded limit was removed from the get_user_posts method so that it can later be made user configurable from the front end.
I would include the utils rescoping pull request merge in this issue because it's related to the rescoping that was done in get_user_posts, which was not considered eligible on its own for a utopian reward, but it's now past the 7 day mark to be elligible, but it's included because it is related.
