Routine to check status of URLs

[RGould8 at aol.com]

If I wanted to write a Revolution script that goes through a list of URLs and 
checks each URL's status, can anyone give me pointers on the best approach?

I was originally attempting to do a "load URL" approach, and then check the 
error that comes back (either OK, or not found, re-direct failure, etc).   
Unfortunately I'm finding that load URL tends to take awhile to get through URLs 
that do not connect.   I thought "load url" was a non-blocking command, but for 
some reason it does freeze the execution of the handler until it gets through 
the bad URLs.

Is there a more "code to the metal of TCP/IP" technique that I could use, 
just for testing the status of the web-sites?   The data I need to get back is:

1)   Whether the site contains a re-direct or not
2)   Whether the site is found or not
3)   Whether the site is blocked or not