aeontech, this the below change adds support for SSL connections. Thanks for the code!
if (isset($url_info['scheme']) && $url_info['scheme'] == 'https') {
$port = 443;
$fp=fsockopen('ssl://'.$url_info['host'], $port, $errno, $errstr, 30);
} else {
$port = isset($url_info['port']) ? $url_info['port'] : 80;
$fp=fsockopen($url_info['host'], $port, $errno, $errstr, 30);
}