I realize this is about as stupid a question as can be but...

I have a directory where I upload images to using Skitch where I will use them on my web site. Skitch uploads them to /home/pat/mydomain/bling

In Apache I have a directory and alias.

Alias /bling /home/pat/mydomain/bling
<Directory /home/pat/mydomain/bling>
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>

I thought the following would do the equivalent in Nginx

location /bling/ {
root /home/pat/mydomain/bling;
}

if I go to http://mydomain/bling/someimage.jpg with Apache I see the image, with Nginx I get "not found".

Sure enough it was a stupid question, but at least I answered it myself :-)

should be

location /bling/ {
root /home/pat/mydomain;
}

in effect the /bling/ is appended to the root when matched in a URL so in the original config Nginx was trying to find /home/pat/mydomain/bling/bling/someimage.jpg
ooops