...
We mostly just used jquery and contenteditable. Other useful software tools we used were HTMLCanvas and Coffeescript. We had a backend in Ruby on Rails but never really got into implementing much of the overhead required to use it.
JQuery provides many useful functions as a javascript library, which were invaluable when implementing certain features (e.g. drag and drop).
...
Finally, Coffeescript made some of the brute coding faster, since it’s somewhat easier to write than raw javascript if you’re familiar with the language. This didn’t really affect our design, but made it faster and easier to write.
We had planned to use Ruby on Rails to save individual users' blog posts, but ended up spending all of our time getting the necessary functionality for the page to work at all instead. If/when we continue work on the project, we'll use the rails backbone to save things in a database with relative ease, as well as keep track of each users' posts and contribution to the site, providing some authentication so each user can only modify his/her own posts.
In conclusion, since we used a web app, much of the complicated overhead of mobile apps wasn't necessary to consider. We used the most basic tools available to us and built up from them, which proved difficult in some cases (especially text editing). If we were to do it again, we might try to use a few more sophisticated tools to minimize the headache of reinventing the wheel.