Funding Choices and Contributor seems to be good choice for small-to-medium blog/news site operators. Compared to Flattr and others I see the potential here to fund a news outlet entirely with this services.
There's a HTML5 browser interface. With some basic scripting/"programming" skills and some front-end magic anyone could build such a service. More important is a good network and security engineer to keep it safe and stable for everyone (around the globe).
Paying someone for developing a (IMHO not really fancy and useful) webapp isn't the same thing as leading "real" startup. A "Startup Guy" works on his product 24/7, talking to investors, partners, costumers and much much more...
Python: Just check the certificates with Python Requests (or take one of 20 lines urllib solutions):
>>> requests.get('https://exmaple.com, verify=True)
requests.exceptions.SSLError: hostname 'exmaple.com' doesn't match either of '*.exmaple.org', 'exmaple.org'