Help me out - Blogger issues

Since I started blogging I have been using Live Writer and I have to say I am a huge fan of it. Now for some reason I cannot get it working on my laptop here in China. I am not sure if that is because of the whole blocking websites issue (which it shouldn't be since I am using a VPN) or if technology just hates me as always.

Either way my last post was done via the incredibly crappy Blogger editor and it took so long and was so frustrating that I didn't even open my blog since then.

So now I need another offline blog editior... any suggestions? I read that zoundry raven is supposed to be similar to Live writer - any experiences?

Help me out. I really want to blog but blogger is killing me right now.

Also: what happened to all the readers from Google Reader now that it is shut down? How do you see updates? Bloglovin? Lemme know! ;)