I have been using phoenix and cron to keep my IRC bots alive for some time, however I never previously needed to see their output.
I actually wrote my own implementation of phoenix, before it was written.
http://svn.toolserver.org/svnroot/stwalkerster/trunk/helpmebot.sh
it's not the best script, but it seems to work well enough. I just hit it with cron every 5 minutes with the restart command, and it seems to work well enough