JavaScript HTTP Status detection

I was using Selenium to do some SEO testing, and for political reasons the tests had to run in the Selenium IDE.
Some of the tests were for HTTP Status: certain pages should return a 301 redirect. So I was asked to find a way to extend the Selenium user-extensions.js file so that it could find the HTTP Status for a page.
I found that it's not possible to do this in JavaScript directly: there is a way to find the HTTP Status code, but unfortunately the 301 redirects are interpreted before JavaScript gets a chance to log them.
In the end, we had to implement a solution where we had our own web-service (written in C#) to read the HTTP Status for a URL, and then we just called that from the Selenium JavaScript. Because the language we were using had access to the HTTP headers from the start, it was able to pick up 301s fine (and we could also code special cases like 404s easily).

Update:
At Angelblade's request, I'm posting some of the code we used to find the HTTP status of a URL. I'm not sure how much use it will be in Java though, since a lot of the processing is handled for us in the .NET objects!
It's probably not the best code, and I'm a bit hesitant about posting it, but it could at least provide a starting point for anyone else who wants to accomplish something similar.

   public Int32 GetStatus(String encodedUrl)
        {
           
            const Int32 Request_Timeout = 90000;
            HttpWebRequest request = (HttpWebRequest) WebRequest.Create(encodedUrl);
            request.Timeout = Request_Timeout;
            request.AllowAutoRedirect = false;
            try
            {
                HttpWebResponse response = (HttpWebResponse) request.GetResponse();
                response.Close();
                return (Int32) response.StatusCode;
            }
            catch (WebException webException)
            {
                if (webException.Status == WebExceptionStatus.ProtocolError &&
                    webException.Message == "The remote server returned an error: (410) Gone.")
                {
                    return 410;
                }
                else
                {
                    throw webException;
                }
            }   

        }