Use curl instead of file_get_contents

file_get_contents() doesn't send a "Connection: close" header and instead waits 15 seconds to time out. Brian worked out the ssl certificate so there's no need to disable `CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER` and `CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST`

My simple tests shows requests going from 16 seconds to 0.7-0.9 seconds. :)

Details on the issue at hand: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3629504/php-file-get-contents-very-slow-when-using-full-url