Getting HTTP status of a site in C under Linux

Hi

I want to create an application to check if a site is active or inactive (homework for networking ). For that I need to connect to the ip at which the site resides and get the status. For that I create a socket with the IP and the port 80 and try to read an answer.
First of all I want to ask if this is the correct course of actions.
Second, I cannot connect with my socket to the designated IP and port 80 - it gives me: Connection refused. How can I connect to the server on which the site resides correctly.
What message I should send to the server to get as response the status of the site or better an error code (404, 500, 200) from which I can see the status of the site.
PS. I can use only the standard libraries on C under LINUX (it is a homework and I cannot use libraries made by someone else)

Thank you in advance. Any help will be much appreciated.

Without seeing some code, who knows what you did wrong?
Have you read beej yet?

Thank you Salem for the link.

In fact I didn't wrote to much code except for trying to connect with a socket to the server.

I need some samples of C code because I'm more of a PHP programmer and I don't know all the functions needed to do this others from the few I learned at the university.

If the connection is refused it might be because the host doesn't allow connection on port 80.
Did you tried to connect normally to the site ?

Do some search on the web and you'll find answers to your questions.

Without writing code, you can use telnet to check the status of the host. Here's an example.

Code:

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$ telnet www.ietf.org 80
HEAD / HTTP/1.1
Host: www.ietf.org

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Sat, 03 Jan 2009 19:47:20 GMT
...

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