I glanced through the article.
I think I tried something like this when I was younger, actually to help me with taking college entrance exams. The method I used suggested that you place a dot at the start of a line and a dot at the end, and basically scan your eyes from dot to dot. Once you get the feel for it, you can obviously go without the visual reference, and just scan from first word to last word. Same idea as the article, just a slightly different technique. Have not heard of or tried the peripheral vision thing.
It is extremely effective. I saw a dramatic increase in speed without much loss of comprehension, to the point where my score incrseased like 8 points - which, on a test that scores from 0 - 40ish, a jump form 25 to 32 is pretty exceptional.
To practice I sped read my favorite book at the time.
I'll say that the risk is going to fast and missing stuff. I don't do it because, as madness mentioned, I enjoy the process of reading. I imagine I read far slower than the average reader, but this doesn't really bother me much.
I'm also out of practice now so I'd have to practice a bit before I did it, but it does work.