B.R.,

Thanks very much! That was incredibly helpful. I had to make a couple minor tweaks to get it working, and I wanted a 302 instead of a 301, but the following is what I ended up with, and it had the added benefit of cutting response time almost in half when I did a load test:

server {
listen 80;
server_name example.com;

root /var/www/register;

location = /index.html {
}

# Default location, request will fallback here if none other
# location block matches
location / {
rewrite ^.*$ /index.html redirect; # 'root' location '/'
}

location /css/ {
}

location /js/ {
}

}