Hi there webmisstress, sadly I don't know the chap that owns jpilot though we are involved with a number of online gaming radio stations. More to the point they all love IRC and as such they try anything to get it to work as you however as almost 99.9% of hosts disallow IRC to be hosted within their networks they utilise Quakenet (most common it would apear)

As such the following is used without issue by two stations we are involved with without issue... utilises both PHP and JavaScript (AJAX) hopefully it should provide you with what you are looking for

suggested AJAX client: http://www.qwebirc.org/features