Nginx not picking up site in sites-enabled?

After over 10 hours of research I have not figured out why this doesn't work! I am trying to move my localhost to my sites-enabled folder which is in /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default. It IS a symlink from the sites-available folder. When using the following configuration I get an "unable to connect" using localhost:8080 as my address nginx.conf (/usr/local/nginx/conf/nginx.conf): user www-data; worker_processes 2; events { worker_connections 1024; } http { include mime.types; default_type application/octet-stream; sendfile on; keepalive_timeout 65; include /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/*; } sites-available (/etc/nginx/sites-available/default): server { listen 8080; root /home/myusername/myown/customdirectory; index index.php index.html index.htm; server_name localhost; location / { try_files $uri $uri/ /index.html; } location /doc/ { alias /usr/share/doc/; autoindex on; allow 127.0.0.1; allow ::1; deny all; } error_page 404 /404.html; error_page 500 502 503 504 /50x.html; location = /50x.html { root /usr/share/nginx/www; } location ~ \.php$ { fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.+)$; fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock; fastcgi_index index.php; include fastcgi_params; } location ~ /\.ht { deny all; } } I can get this working if I put the relevant info from sites available to the nginx.conf, I just can't figure out why it doesn't work this way? Thanks!