The other collaborator here. I started with a similar client called web-irc, to make a better open source web IRC client. I combined forced with thedjpetersen because his tech stack was almost identical. And it looked better, to boot :-)

Tech used: Node.js, node-irc, socket.io, Backbone.js, and MongoDB for optional message logging on persistent connections.

Feedback and contributions welcome.

This article is linked to the github repo, but you can use the client directly here: http://ridezap.com:3000/