OK folks sorry for the late follow up, but I finally got a chance to tinker with this some more and was able to serve up a website from the raspberry pi using node.js, running of course on a battery rather than solar panels as it was about midnight by that time.  Big thanks to The Doctor who recompiled node on his B+ over the better part of a day.  I recommend following this link and using this package if you want to set node up on your RPi.  Once I get a bit further along in terms of functionality, I'll share my whole B+ image and power electronics schematic for other people to use.

forwarded from the good doctor a few weeks ago:

>in a bit of a pickle here. trying to get node working on a
>raspberry pi B+ for a lightweight solar powered server. anyone
>accomplished this?

Yes, but not easily.

I followed the tutorial you linked to later in your post, but was
unable to get it to work reliably. What did work was compiling libv8
and node.js manually and building .deb packages, a process that took
most of a day on a RasPi model B. If you want to give the package a
try, here's the link to our public repo:

http://svn.virtadpt.net/byzantium/v0.5b/armel/node_0.10.18-1_armhf.deb

- --
The Doctor [412/724/301/703] [ZS]
Developer, Project Byzantium: http://project-byzantium.org/