So my friend and I are working on an arcade-style game in Python and Pygame. We're beginning to look at the feasibility of an online leaderboard, given our current programming backgrounds. Such a leaderboard would have the following requirements/features;

• The ability to search through demographics like region, country, platform, game mode, recentness ("best scores this month") and difficulty. (e.g. to make it possible for someone to say "I'm the best player in Italy!" or "I'm the best Linux player in South America!")
• Our game will not have online multiplayer, so no need to worry about that.
• We don't expect the game to be a million-dollar hit.
• We want the scores to be accessible both from in-game and the website.
• We would like some semblance of security to make sure no one plugs fake scores into the system.

This is our present situation;

• Neither I nor my friend have any network programming background. All I really know is that sockets are low-level, HTTP is high-level.
• I happen to know that the Google App Engine might be useful for something like this, and I'm really thinking about going with that.
• We're not sure how we would store all the high score data.
• Our game will be free and open source (though we might keep the components that submit the high scores closed-source).

Aside from all of this, we don't really have any idea where to begin. Any thoughts?